My sister Claudette called from Baton Rouge at ten past eight that morning, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Earl, sit down, and do not hang up on me.” I was already sitting, on the edge of my porch swing with the photograph in my hand. Lawrence Bastien had left it with me the day before, the old snapshot of a skinny fifteen year old on the hood of a car, and I had been staring at that boy for two hours. I could not look away. He had my ears, and he had no idea what was coming.
“Lawrence called me last night,” Claudette said. “He found my number through the old church of Mama. Earl, I have to tell you something I should have told you fifty years ago.” Her voice was thick, as if she had been crying for a long while. I told her to say it. “Mama knew,” she said. “She always knew. She made me promise when I was twelve years old never to speak of it, and I kept that promise until the day Mama died. But I cannot keep it anymore. You did not fall off a ladder in the summer of 1968.”
I held the phone against my ear and looked out at the yard. My wife had gone to the kitchen to stand at the window with her back to me. Claudette told it in pieces, clearly, deliberately. The man in the car that night, she said, was our uncle Roy Dupree, the brother of our mother, who owned the gas station where I worked. He was a drinker and a bully and a man who liked to put his hands on women. That night on the old highway, he had pulled over to a Black woman whose car had broken down, and he had not stopped to help.
I put my hand over my eyes. A fifteen year old boy, I thought, running out of a gas station with a tire iron. Running toward a man twice his size. “He hit you,” Claudette said. “With the iron, on the back of the head. You were out cold for three days in the hospital in Shreveport. When you woke up, you did not remember a thing. The doctor said it was a mercy. Mama told you it was a ladder, and she told Roy that if he ever came near you again, she would go to the sheriff. He left town that week. He was dead by 1974.”
A boy of fifteen did the bravest thing of his life, and then a kind lie let him forget it, so that a woman could remember him for the rest of hers.
I sat there for a very long time. The swing creaked. A mockingbird sang from the pecan tree. I had spent my whole life believing that I was an ordinary man, a truck driver who changed other people tires and drank his coffee on the porch. All the while, there had been a boy inside me who stood between a stranger and her danger, and took a blow for her, and never knew. I told my sister that I forgave her. She started to cry again, softly, on the telephone, a hundred and sixty miles away.
Mrs. Odessa Bastien received me that Sunday afternoon in the front parlor of her home in Shreveport, a tall house on a shady street, full of books and the smell of lavender. She was eighty one years old, straight backed and dignified, and she wore a gray silk dress and the same pearls I had seen on the highway. She had been a high school English teacher for forty one years, and then a principal. I stood in her doorway with my hat in my hands like a child. “Mr. Landreneau,” she said. “Please. Come in.”
We sat on a flowered sofa, and Lawrence poured the tea. For a moment neither of us could speak. Then Mrs. Bastien reached out and took my hand in both of hers, as if it were something precious. “In the summer of 1968,” she said, “I was thirty one years old, a young teacher, driving home from my mother house in the dark. When the man pulled over, I knew what he wanted. I knew, because I had read about such things, and because I had grown up in this state. I was more frightened than I have ever been.”
“And then a boy came out of the dark,” she said. “A skinny boy in a gas station shirt with a piece of iron in his hands. He did not say a word. He just walked up and stood beside my car. The man laughed at him, and then the man hit him. I saw you fall. I screamed. I think the scream is what made the man drive off. A deputy found me an hour later, sitting on the road with your head in my lap. They took you away in an ambulance, and I never learned your name.”
She had searched, she said. For fifty six years. She had written to the hospital, the police, the gas station, which had closed. She had put a notice in the newspaper every August. She had named a scholarship at her high school for the boy who stood up, with no name attached, and every year she gave it to a student who had defended someone smaller. Forty eight students had received it. She said she had always imagined the boy would turn out good. “And here you are,” she said. “A good man. Exactly as I prayed.”
I did not know what to say. I only knew that tears were running down my face, and that my wife, who had come with me, was crying too, and that Lawrence had turned away to the window. Mrs. Bastien reached into a drawer of the small table beside her and drew out a Bible with a worn leather cover. Inside the front, written in her teacher hand, was an inscription dated 1968. To the unknown boy on the road to Shreveport. May God keep him, and may I live to say thank you.
“Thank you, Mr. Landreneau,” she said. “Thank you for stopping again.” I told her that I had not remembered, and that it was she who deserved the thanks, for never giving up. She laughed, and then we were both laughing and crying and holding each other like old friends, which in a strange way we were. My wife poured more tea. Lawrence wiped his eyes. Outside, a mockingbird, perhaps the same one, sang in the live oak at the corner.
This year they gave the scholarship in my name. Mrs. Bastien insisted. A girl of seventeen named Janelle received it, in a green dress, at the high school auditorium, and I sat in the front row beside her mother. When they called my name, I walked up on the stage in my good suit and shook her hand. Janelle had stopped a bully in the cafeteria that fall. I looked into her bright, serious face and thought of a skinny boy on a gas station hood, and I knew he would have been proud.